My company has become the first consultant from Pakistan to be added to Debian’s consultants list:
http://www.debian.org/consultants/#Pakistan
Although I’ve stayed with Red Hat on most of my machines for quite a while now (yes, being an RHCE played a part in that), some of their recent decisions have earned them some bad publicity in the tech community. Mainly their use of the Bluecurve desktop (which I rather like) and short product cycles (they’re stopping support for 7.3 soon) has eroded the goodwill they once had.
I don’t see an immediate reason to switch, but may have to if things get any worse. Off course, this won’t happen if we decide to become authorized resellers (have the form on my desk now), but is quite likely otherwise or at least on some machines.
Yesterday I got my Knoppix CD that I asked my friend to download and put it on an old 400MHz Dell that I’ve bought. This caused many oohs and aahs from those around. In case you’re wondering what the hell Knoppix is or how it is pronounced, it is a Debian based German distribution that boots from the CD and brings up a full desktop without needing to touch your harddrive. Can’t tell ya how to pronounce it, but you should be able to find something on their site.
It took about as much time to boot on this machine as Windows 2000 might have if it was booting from the drive. Impressive. Though the installer, that permanently puts it on the drive, didn’t work properly.
Next step, look at other distros. Will need a lot of bandwidth, but that won’t be a problem thanks to Shiraz who works for an ISP.